


Tales of the Former Gunters

by AlvinLaurance



Category: Ready Player One - Ernest Cline
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-02-01
Packaged: 2019-03-02 01:39:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13307700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlvinLaurance/pseuds/AlvinLaurance





	1. Chapter 1: The Last Survivor of Melmac

# Tales of the Former Gunters

## Episode 4: Revenge is a Dish Best Served Cold.

### Chapter 1: The Last Survivor of Melmac

The client who came to me set the tone when he asked, "You do realize that Halliday never watched _Get Smart,_ right?" 

We were standing in a re-creation of the Chief's office. The office had a very modern feel for eighty years earlier--simulated wood-grain paneling walls punctuated with the occasional painting or period map. In the center, stood a large, stately desk with old-fashioned landline phone, and box with analog switches. The main door into the office was a sliding panel that blended into the walls. As one sat behind the desk, to the right, there were a collection of built-in bookcases, and, closer to the door, a couch. On the left, a light table that blinded anyone who looked at and incinerated anything placed on it--comic in the show, useful to my OASIS business. The office gave an overall '60s vibe, but the background music was also not period-appropriate for the show--it was a mix of 1980s popular songs with Laura Branigan's "Gloria" playing at this moment. And, of course there were the hovering robot.

The quip just made me sigh, and I gave the ErIk_TaNnEr a skeptical look. "And you realize that the name of the baby on _Alf_ was spelled with a C, not a K, right? And wasn't a minotaur." Before the minotaur in my office could object, I raised my hand in a "stop" gesture and shook my head. "First, we don't know that Halliday never watched it. I am well aware that he didn't mention it in Anorak's Almanac. He did watch some '60s TV--he LOVED _The Addams Family_ , _Star Trek_ , and _Doctor Who_. He also owned an old landline telephone modeled on Maxwell Smart's shoephone, but it was found in its original box and it could well have been a gift he never used."

"Where in hell did you hear THAT?" ErIk_TaNnEr interrupted.

"It was in a news article that came out shortly after Parzival won. It was about cultural stuff related to the Halliday estate that the gunters supposedly never knew." I left out the obvious--if the Egg and control of the OASIS were still in play, every gunter in the world would have examined every item listed in the article, and probably everything tangentially related to those items. However, the point was moot--and it only came out because Wade Watts was literally cleaning out Haliday's closet. "In any case, whether he went for the spy shows or sitcoms at all is beside the point. This is **_*MY*_** home in the OASIS, and it's based on what **_*I*_** like. When I talked to my grandfather about pop culture, he talked wistfully about watching _Get Smart_." I paused for a moment. "In reruns, of course, and as a child. In any case, he turned me on to the show. Hence the name and the office."

"Maybe if you'd been more focused on what HALLIDAY liked, Agent99, and less focused on what YOU liked, you could have beaten Parzival."

It was 2047. For seven years, Halliday's Easter Egg Hunt dominated life in the OASIS. James Donovan Halliday, the eccentric inventor of this massive virtual reality universe, died in '39--leaving his two-hundred-forty-billion dollar fortune to anyone who could find an Easter Egg in the OASIS. Millions of OASIS users became "egg hunters"--a.k.a., gunters. No one was surprised that the Hunt hinged on the '80s pop-culture Halliday was fixated on. Some were surprised it took six years for anyone to find the first clue--long enough for many gunters to lose interest. However many thousands didn't. Solo gunters, gunter clans, and even corporations such as IOI got in on the act. In the end, a lone gunter named Wade Watts, also known by his OASIS avatar name, Parzival, solved the puzzles needed to inherit the fortune.

ErIk_TaNnEr's comment about why I lost rated a glare and crossed arms. "Because you did so well in the Hunt yourself, doing that." I'd clearly gotten under his skin. He grunted. "Besides, if Parzival had taken that approach, he'd have never played the Pac Man game and gotten the Extra Life Quarter artifact, and he wouldn't have won himself. And if I'd been a little less interested in the Jade Key after the Battle of Frobozz, I might have still a crapload of good inventory from the place."

ErIk_TaNnEr grunted. "Yeah. Speaking of your inventory, do you have to have it here?" He pointed at the floating robot. "I know my _Next Gen_. 'The Arsenal of Freedom'--those fucking things tried to kill everyone."  
"That's the idea. Well, sort of. Echo-Papa 607 did just that. This is the Echo-Papa 608. My own design. If I get killed, they kill the killer. The other sentries blast the ships in the hanger to bits, also. Call it a safety measure for me. Arms dealer, hired assassin, adventurer--I live a dangerous virtual life. I take precautions."

"You could just fucking make this place a no-PvP zone."

"It makes me feel **_ALIVE!_** " I said--deliberately melodramatically. I even stretched out my arms as I spoke.

"Seriously?"

I looked at ErIk_TaNnEr. "It does. Also--people like to test weapons here. You know, there are players who will take cash to let you kill their avatars. I can't count how many level 1 suicide-for-hire players have died in on my firing range. I can call some over if you'd like. Most of them charge twenty bucks cash for quick kills."

"They'll let you kill their avatar for twenty dollars? They do know they lose all their shit and their level right?"

"They tend to be level one, and not to have any shit. A lot of them are people who got tired of playing in the OASIS, if they ever did to begin with, and want to make a quick buck in the real world. It's easier than making or selling stuff."

"Fuck. And you called them 'suicide-for-hire?'"

"Suicide-for-hire. That's the term. Weapons dealers like myself need them--some weapons are designed to track PC avatars. You can't properly test them on an NPC or a player who doesn't get killed in the end. They also work for people who want practice hunting PCs. Think 'The Most Dangerous Game.'"

"What's that?"

I rolled my eyes. "You've never heard of 'The Most Dangerous Game?' Richard Connell? It's a short story--about a crazy hunter who hunts people. From the 1920s, I think. I also think they made a movie or two from it."

"Not something Halliday was into--never read it."

I was getting a bit tired of ErIk_TaNnEr, and not hiding it. I let things sit for a moment, before changing the subject. "So--what brings you here? Your e-mail said you wanted an assassin." I also wondered why he insisted on coming here--and not doing a chatlink.

"Yes. Melmac blew up. Nuked."

"I know. I watched the whole series of _Alf_. That was a key plot point."

"No--not that Melmac. The one in the OASIS. My clan's Melmac." He said this calmly.

Misspelled '80s sitcom character name? I hadn't given his name much thought. I put him in the same bucket as MURH3YBR0WN--the guy who wanted me to kill his former gunter partner for failing to find Halliday's egg. When the contest started, gunters, especially wannabes, would often adopt 'appropriate' names: '80s pop-culture references, sometimes in complete ignorance of the underlying source material. The DSnyder who thought Dee Snyder was the lead singer of Def Leopard; the MichaelKeaton who thought that was a character from _Family Ties _; the aforementioned male MURH3YBR0WN. Hell, even though I considered DerKomissar a friend, he misspelled his own name, going by the song. Some people did that, of course, because someone else got the correctly spelled name first. That said, I had no reason to think the character in the room with me had any connection to _Alf_.__

____

The names of the High Five pleased me no end--a reference to medieval legend, a classical reference, a two-fold reference to traditional Japanese weaponry, and a name of personal significance--all five appropriate and correct. So many gunters, like the player base of the OASIS in general, had idiotic names--I tended to think an idiotic name meant an idiotic player. They didn't, and it seemed likely that enough intelligence to get his or her own name right would be a prerequisite of finding the egg--or should. I'd only really heard of Art3mis through her blog before their names appeared on the board. Aech was a celebrity, too, but I never paid much attention to arena fighting. It pleased me no end that someone literate solved the puzzle--as opposed to a sux0r or some n00b blundering into it.

I reconsidered ErIk_TaNnEr. His avatar was a seven-foot minotaur--the lack of a minotaur in 'Alf' might seem more glaring than a misspelled name, but the OASIS allowed you to change bodies more easily than one can change clothes in the real world. His body was clad in a furry loincloth of some sort. His long horns extended about a foot and a half from the bull's head I'd figured he wanted to look imposing--nothing more. However, it was beginning to seem he did have some interest in he show, but his voice was unemotional when he talked about the destruction of a planet he had an interest in.

"OK. So--what do you want?" I asked in a deadpan voice.

"I want you to kill Mephistopheles."

"You want me to kill the devil?"

ErIk_TaNnEr nodded. "No--the player with that handle. The Tanner Family Gunter Clan was a small clan. The founders were AlfHimself and WillieTanner--from the names, you might gather that both of them were fans of the show. They thought, based on one of the entries in Anorak's Almanac, that _Alf_ held the key to the Easter Egg Hunt. The show didn't, of course. I think they figured that out as early '40 or'41. Anyway, we had about 70 members at our height, and we had the Crystal Key.

"We knew we'd never get through straightaway at Castle Anorak. The Sixers, the High Five, the larger clans--we were outnumbered. We did have one thing in our favor--the Warp Drive. The Warp Drive was an artifact that let a ship go twice light speed--twice as fast as the next fastest ship in the OASIS."

I whistled. Spaceships in the OASIS couldn't normally go faster than the speed of light. Most laws of physics could be altered in the OASIS. For example, we were sitting in an asteroid made mostly of a meitnerium-hassium-darmstadtium alloy. The alloy was modeled on a real world iridium-osmium-platinum alloy that was one of the densest and hardest (and most expensive) metals available. My asteroid's meitnerium-hassium-darmstadtium alloy was, using denser and harder analogs, was even superior. In the OASIS, however, you could solve the nagging problem that kept anyone from using the alloy in the real world--tweak the weak force, and the three elements were no longer highly radioactive species with half-lives of only a few seconds, obtainable only in quantities of a few atoms. However, one of the few immutable laws of the OASIS was that ships couldn't go faster than light. One might think that this was a reflection of Einstein's physics that GSS coders couldn't dispense with--and one so thinking would probably be wrong. First, the OASIS used an absolute coordinate system: the Michaelson-Morely experiment, what Einstein's theory was developed to explain, did away with that in the real world (unless you believe that Cleveland, Ohio, is the absolute, unmoving center of the universe). Second, the Lorentz transformations just didn't happen--time didn't slow down, lengths didn't grow, nor did mass increase as you approached the speed of light--you could generally simulate those effects to some extent if you wanted, even without traveling near light speed, but they didn't happen on their own. Indeed--you could REACH light speed in the OASIS, while you couldn't in the real world. OASIS physics, in short, used Newonian models. Good Newtonian models that could be altered in many ways--and were to mimic effects of Einstein's principles in places. But this wasn't one, it seemed. Most people thought the light speed limit was there to encourage people to use teleportation, which meant more money to GSS--white-hat corporation that it may be, had to earn money some way, after all. Others thought there might really be some aspect of Einstein's theory that really was somehow indispensable to the OASIS physics models. Still others thought that there was hidden code that would allow someone, someday, to figure out how to develop a ship that could go faster than light--a gift from Halliday to some future genius coder. But no one knew for sure. If the Warp Drive artifact existed, it meant FTL travel was possible. That would be a big deal. "THAT is an artifact. How come I never heard of it?"

"The same reason why no one heard of Parzval's Extra Life Quarter before Castle Anorak--it never went up for sale."

I nodded. That made sense.

ErIk_TaNnEr continued. "Our plan was simple. We figured the Sixers had the Cataclyst and that they'd use it when all hell broke loose. We counted on them taking out themselves and all the competition. They massed their fleet at the closest point to Chthonia. We put the Shumway on Perma One, an asteroid with a transport terminal slightly further away. We didn't want them to attack it before the Cataclyst went off. We held our best gamers on Melmac, near the transport terminal there. When the word came through, we'd move en masse. Slightly longer trip plus time to teleport and prep the ship, we'd still be able to make it through the gate first."

"But you didn't. It was Parzival because of the Extra Life, and the only ones on his heals were sux0rz."

"About six in the morning, the day of the Battle of Castle Anorak, the sux0rz nuked Melmac. Killed every avatar on the planet. In the aftermath, they stole the Warp Drive. However, that wasn't enough. They then killed the leaders of the Clan in the real world. The IOI executive who planned the whole thing uses a personal account with the screen name Mephistopheles."

"Holy shit!" I muttered. I was dumbstruck at first, and silent. I hated IOI--I had strong personal reasons. Maybe that made me too willing to believe anything said against them--but I still paid attention to the news, and it still seemed clear they had a corporate culture that was willing to flout the law. Financial and business law? The stock option fraud case of '37, rampant insider trading among the executives, the manipulation of Internet Access America stock leading to that company's bankruptcy. Cybercrime? There were at least a dozen likely cases of theft of plans or code from competitors; there was the uncanny pattern that, when politicians proposed regulations that would rein in IOI, those politicians invariably had their cloud storage hacked and the most embarrassing info published; most damaging, they had several times been caught hacking net neutrality systems that were supposed to give competitors equal access to shared infrastructure, but, at IOI's tampering, didn't. Even so, the murder of Toshiro "Daito" Yoshiaki and bombing of the Stacks in Oklahoma City in an attempt to kill Wade "Parzival" Watts were shocking. Violent crime--even by rogue executives in the blackest of black hats in the corporate world--was a huge step away from the white-collar misdeeds we'd all come to expect. That said--I'd never heard of any other IOI real world murders. Of course, last year there were 73,000 murders in the real world U.S. alone. That we know of--the Stacks bombing was mistaken for a meth lab accident for almost a year.

It was almost too much to believe. That wasn't what seemed odd do me, though. So, I asked, "Forgive me, but killing the man's avatar seems a poor substitute for the real world criminal justice system. I kill OASIS avatars, I am no real world assassin."

Now was ErIk_TaNnEr's turn to wave off my objection. He produced a box from his pocket that looked like a small TV remote control--a very old fashioned one, but with only two buttons. "I already have talked to the FBI. We don't know where Mephistopheles is in the real world. We know he's not in Columbus, but that's it. He may not even be in the U.S.. GSS doesn't log IP addresses--this is by design to protect privacy. What I need you to do is track down Mephistopheles. When you catch up with him, press the yellow button. This will send out a signal revealing what server is running that part of the OASIS at that moment. Then, you need to kill him--that's no small task, because he's level 99 and a highly skilled fighter. Killing him will force him to log off. When you kill him, before his body dematerializes, press the red button. We'll be able to track where he logs off from GSS's end."

This still didn't completely smell right to me. I almost never turn down assassination jobs. First, almost invariably, the target had done something to deserve it, even though, usually, the client was no innocent either. In this case, if one tenth of the story was true, Mephisopheles deserved what he'd get. Second, if I didn't take the job, usually someone else would, or worse: while I was still in college, I turned down a job and the rejected client bought a nuke and set it off in a dance club, killing his target and more than a thousand innocent avatars. Third--this is the chaotic neutral in me talking--killing other PCs is fun. Maybe **_*I*_** am taking "The Most Dangerous Game" too seriously myself. However, the OASIS is a game, and sometimes you don't win. I'm no worse than the ghosts of _Pac Man_. No--the thing that troubled me was the button. I wanted no part of hacking the OASIS. On the other hand, the chance to help bring an IOI murderer to justice was irresistible. I had to say yes. I could, unpalatable though it may be, back out later. But if I said no, I wouldn't get another chance to take the case. The button answered one question--he refused to handle the business via a chatlink, obviously, because he needed to give me the button. So...groundwork. "OK. Color me interested. Any clues on how to find Mephistopheles?"

"Every Tuesday, he goes to the Roman arena on Andronici in Sector Eight. He likes the gladiatorial games."

"Why there? Andronici is a planet dedicated to Shakespeare's _Titus Andronicus_ \--why not go to a Roman world?"

ErIk_TaNnEr shruged. "I can't say--he likes it there I guess. He has been going there every Tuesday for the past few months."

I nodded. "Do you have a picture of him?"

"E-mailing it now." The e-mail came immediately. The man in question was an aged figure. He wore long, purple robes. His face looked a bit like Sir Christopher Lee late in life--like when he played Saurman or Count Dooku.

"I'll take the job. I want 50,000 credits. 25,000 up front, the rest due on completion. If I decide that I can't complete the job, I'll keep 5000 credits to cover expenses. If you back out, I keep all the up-front cash. I also want the source code for the button device."

"I'll agree to all the terms, except I want to pay 10,000 up front and 40,000 on completion. Also--you can't have the source code. It's not mine to share, and classified by the FBI."

"No less than Twenty."

"Fifteen."

I paused for a moment--feigning consideration--but I made up my mind. "OK. Done." My client then placed a stack of fifteen platinum coins on the Chief's desk. I picked them up and put them in my inventory--my cash balance rose by 15,000 credits. "Today is Sunday. I'll kill him this Tuesday."

"Please do. You should know--he has killed three previous assassins. Also, two previous assassins backed out--I had both of them killed."

"He won't kill me. And I never back out." I somewhat lied--I had backed out of a few of early commissions. I'd also just failed a few times--went after higher level avatars or avatars of better players. However, as I wanted to build my reputation as an assassin and got better at the game myself, I tracked down and killed most of the few targets I'd refused or failed. Mind you, this was after the deadlines, so I didn't get paid. I think in one case, the target and the client had smoothed things over and my late reconsideration had rekindled the acrimony. There were a few of my failed commissions who had vanished completely. Be that as it may, I had, ultimately, killed everyone I'd agreed to in the last fifteen years. I might refuse to take a job in the first place: case in point, two days after the contest ended, someone tried to hire me to kill Parzival--as in, THE Parzival--and I said no because I'm not batshit crazy. However, if I agreed to kill an avatar, I would kill that avatar. That's why backing out bothered me--if I had to do it, it'd be the first time in many years I'd balked. Even though I did follow through with commissions consistently, I still gave terms for backing out--most clients either didn't care or were impressed when I followed through.

I also took his threat to kill me seriously. One of the clients I backed out on also had the next assassin kill my avatar, too (which meant that when I went back to kill the original target, it was his second death--he was particularly unhappy). Then again, I'd also had a couple of clients try to kill me after I did the job, an early one actually succeeding there, too. This baffled me completely--in the real world, you might kill a hitman to hide your connection to the murder or to keep the hired assassin from talking, but in the OASIS, it was not illegal to kill another avatar or hire someone else to do it, and killing an avatar wouldn't silence anyone because nine-hundred-ninety-nine times out of a thousand, the player would create a new avatar--and the player would still know everything he or she knew before. Still--it did happen. I never took kindly to it. All told, I was in my ninth incarnation in the OASIS--most of my deaths had been when I was new to the assassin game--killing an elite, high-level player's avatar is much harder than any quest. I became better--the only time I'd been killed since my junior year in college was at the Battle of Castle Anorak.

As I escorted ErIk_TaNnEr back to his ship, I tried to make small talk. "Why did you choose Eric Tanner?" "What's your favorite _ALF_ episode?" "Do you still listen to '80s music and watch '80s TV and movies now that the contest is over?" The last question particularly interested me--I had been into retro culture long before the contest; without the Egg as a prize, Halliday's singular emphasis on the decade was somewhat less important, and some gunters had explored the later and earlier decades out of curiosity--a few had turned up in the hippie camp where my grandfather spent much of his time. Despite my questions, my client's answers weren't even long enough to qualify as laconic--he grunted or shrugged or occasionally managed to say as much as "I don't know." It got irritating.

I watched as my client walked down the docking arm and into his small ship--a version of the Delta Flyer from _Star Trek: Voyager. _Off the shelf, as best my scans could tell. Boring ship for a boring avatar. As soon as he closed the hatch, I disengaged the docking arm and pulled it away. As soon as he was clear, I revoked all his permissions to enter PlanetArgon's space and recalled the Echo-Papa robots that were shadowing him. He may have been boring, but I still didn't trust my client.__

____

I next turned my attention to the mysterious button box. I Googled everything I could think of to find out if police or FBI really used buttons like this to track down people. I'd found a couple of stories in recent detective fiction and Q-and-A boards asking "was this possible?" Nothing definitive. No such boxes for sale on the black market. No news articles. No first hand accounts. Either it was a really well-kept secret or a trope of fiction. Nothing pre-2046, either--so this was new. Maybe Parzival's idea after what IOI did?

Next, I spent a couple of hours trying every divination and identification spell I could think of. I then tried every sort of scan my equipment could do. ErIk_TaNnEr or whoever built it had warded and shielded the hell out of it. I had nothing.

Just to be safe, I e-mailed GSS. I told them what I'd been hired to do, and gave them an inventory number for the box. I also said I didn't want them to tell me what the box was--they wouldn't have answered if I had that because the OASIS was a game after all, and some things you had to figure out for yourself. I only wanted to make sure that I wasn't being somehow tricked into hacking or damaging the OASIS itself. That'd be bad mojo.

  
  
  
* * *  
  


The next day and a half were fairly uneventful. After I batted off the e-mail, I logged out and got some dinner. That night, I spent the evening sparring with Makemake. Makemake was an ex-boyfriend I'd met in college. I introduced him to the OASIS. He took the name from the chief god of the Tangata manu "birdman" religion of Rapa Nui. I was never sure why exactly he chose the name--he was a birdwatcher, but he was also an amateur astronomer and Makemake was the namesake of a trans-Nepunian object.

Makemake, in the real world, broke up with me a few months after we started going out. For me, virtual arms dealing, questing, and assassination was becoming a profession even while I was in school, but it never was more than a hobby for him. He wasn't completely comfortable with the assassin-for-hire deal an never did that himself. Even questing as long as he had been he still hadn't completed the climb to ninety-nine. The two of us remained friends, though, and I knew he had become an English teacher at a Catholic school near Albuquerque, and, after it closed in '36, in the OASIS Public Schools. He was also somewhat uncomfortable with earning a living in the OASIS. That was also partly why we broke up--he believed we should focus on the real world. That he had to resort to teaching in a virtual school probably grated on him. When the contest came around, he was a very casual gunter at best. Everyone wanted the prize, after all, but it was no more serious than buying a lottery ticket for some people. However, he still was determined to keep up his combat skills--I think it was his way of staying in shape. We didn't talk about my commission.

I spent Monday goofing off. I had a big day tomorrow, and wanted to relax. I slept late. When I got up, I started the day with my morning cardio workout followed soon with a Flicksync of _The Wizard of Oz_ \--the original from 1939, not the idiotic remake from nearly a century later (I'd like to throw that version somewhere over the rainbow). I then went down to my firing range and blew off a couple of thousand rounds. I wound out my morning taking a virtual row down the Schuykill River in Philadelphia of the mid-1970s.

Sometime while I was logged out to get lunch, I got an answer from GSS. They said that the button box was a device designed to function within the OASIS simulation, in accordance with its laws of physics. There was no reason based on OASIS/GSS rules not to push either button. Somehow, that answer was mildly unnerving.

I had my agent software to prep my ship, the _Legolas_ , for departure that afternoon. I could afford to teleport there, but why? I had my own ship, the fuel costs were much less than the teleportation costs, and I was going to sleep overnight anyway--so the time was no issue. Just eighteen hours travel time. Since I'd be on the ship for so long, I opted for the couch potato route. I watched _WarGames_ , two episodes of the original _Star Trek_ ("The Paradise Syndrome," and "For the World Is Hollow..."), _North by Northwest,_ an episode of _Get Smart_ ("One of Our Olives is Missing"), and an episode of the original _MacGyver_ ("Cleo Rocks"). I'd seen all of the above before--but I was looking for escapism--I didn't want to have to think too much about what I was watching. Between the _Star Trek_ and Hitchcock, I had dinner, bathed, and, after logging back in, called my grandfather.

It was starting to get late, so I logged out again. It took me a couple of minutes to climb out of my rig--I used a full suspension rig. I began using a suspension rig in college. I joined the rowing team, knowing that if I didn't get exercise, a life mostly in the OASIS would lead me down a road of diabetes, cardiovascular problems, and assorted ills stemming from a sedentary lifestyle. The coach of the rowing team recommended the suspension rig--so I got one. I used suspension rigs since then. People either loved or hated full suspension rigs--I loved mine. They worked by basically making the person into a marionette in reverse. They're more expensive than omnidirectional treadmills, but not as costly as hamster balls. (I lived in a trailer--so I couldn't have used a hamster ball rig even if I wanted one, because it wouldn't have fit through the door.) Some people didn't like the feeling of hanging from bungee cords, or felt that they caused their haptic suits to bunch up. I think both problems were worse when you you used cheap gear, and especially if you used a haptic suit not designed specifically designed for a suspension rig. Some people were also bothered by auto-rotate and hang-freezing: the former being when the rigs would sometimes gently move and grab you during inactive moments to unhook, untangle, and re-attach tethers, and the latter being more annoying, when your expensive, full-motion rig temporarily became only nominally more than a visor-and-glove set because you got badly tangled in the cords and the machine had to take several minutes to untangle the cords. There was also also the problem that even bothered me--all those connections--fourteen tether lines and a neck guard--took a long time to hook up. All that said, the thing was wonderful in one regard--it was better at simulating any sort of motion than any other rig I'd tried: in short, I liked to do my own stunts.

And now, if you want proof that I am a certifiable, complete, and off-the-charts OASIS addict, consider what happens when I go to bed: after I put my haptic suit in the cleaning unit and brushed and flossed my teeth, I then put on a simple OASIS console, disabled my auto-log-out, shut down incoming calls except for a few close friends and family, and went to bed and to sleep. In the OASIS, I slept in my virtual bed while I also slept in my real bed--so that if anything happened in the OASIS, I would be there. Absent that, it was simply drifting from my waking dreams to my sleeping ones. If I spent less than sixteen hours in a given day in the OASIS--I was practically off the grid in my book.


	2. Chapter 2:  Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand

### Chapter 2: Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand

Being an assassin takes me to some interesting simulations. Baghdad. Mogadishu. Jacksonville. Today, it was taking me to a virtual Shakespearean version of ancient Rome. 

Only in the OASIS would one take a spaceship to ancient Rome. And when it comes to spaceships, I have options--for the past few years, I've owned about forty spaceships at any given time. Yes--that's a lot for one person. Being an arms dealer, I buy and sell ships. Eventually, you build up inventory doing that. At the time of this mission, I had in my various hangers a collection of two dozen cars designed to function as spaceships--including a KITT, an A-Team van, a '60s open-top Batmobile, and enough flying DeLorean fake time machines to sell them in bulk; for larger ships I had three _Firefly_ -class transports, as many X-Wing fighters, a small assortment of Starfleet shuttlecraft of various generations, a Klingon Bird of Prey, no less than seven _Millennium Falcons_ , and even a pair of Sux0r gunships. All of these were for sale at reasonable and negotiable prices.

The _Legolas_ , however, was not inventory for sale. It was my own personal flagship. Its appearance was modeled on the _Galaxy Explorer_ from the Lego Classic Space series. It was a mass-produced hull, so the ship was not completely unique, but many people preferred sci-fi franchise ships--making it a fairly rare design. Compared to several million _Millennium Falcons_ out there (there were a million in '28--do the math) there may have been a few thousand _Galaxy Explorers_. A used (and badly modified) _Galaxy Explorer_ came into my hanger for sale a dozen years ago. I'd kicked around the idea of getting my own for a few years after that, and when the contest started, I'd already been leaning toward the idea of upgrading my transport. That's when I bought the _Legolas_.

The hull was a light gray, roughly diamond-shaped wing with blue fuselage with yellow-tinted windows on top--a crew-section fore and cargo-bay in the aft. Mounted on wings were two large engines, with two more engines mounted on the back of the cargo bay. It even had the odd yellow an black stripes on the wings that served no obvious purpose. I did change the registration number from the Lego model--the _Legolas_ was LL-991.

My version was not a perfect model of the Lego set. While many spaceships had been scaled down from their television or cinematic prototypes, mine had been scaled-up for the same reason--to make it more practical for its purpose. The cargo hold--in the model, only able to hold a small lunar rover--could now easily hold a full-size tank or a Starfleet shuttle. The forward section was modified more extensively--the cockpit that once only held two or three seated astronauts was now a grand bridge measuring fifteen by fifteen virtual feet with five well-spaced command stations, and behind that an equally large lounge area, replete with conversation pit, three multi-game cabinet video game units, full-size movie screen, state-of-the-art sound system, media library unit (a mid-range model with access to 350,000 feature-length movies, 18,000 complete TV series, 39,000 additional partial TV series, 24,000,000 hours of music, 13,000,000 video games, 95,000,000 books, and other assorted documents), and--in half whimsey, half homage to the historical period so important to the creator of the OASIS--an 8-track tape player. There was also a lower deck (absent in the Lego toy) with two large staterooms: each with a virtual queen-size bed that could morph into a couch, full-size desk, closet, and four-foot video screen. The starboard-side large stateroom was set up as my personal cabin, and had an Atari 2600 console (tied into the media unit above, but also with a dozen favorite cartridges for atmosphere), a poster of Orlando Bloom, and (in this case, not idle decoration) a hatch with manual locks leading outside the ship so that if someone did take the ship, I could don my spacesuit, go out the back door, and get out. Aft of the large staterooms, there were two small staterooms--single bed that folded up to allow access to a desk. Further back, I had a small gymnasium, a workshop/laboratory, an armory/spacesuit locker, and an equipment room for add-ons to the ship. The ship had no galley or bathrooms--since food and bathroom needs were real-world needs, there was no real point to either in the sim. Some OASIS locations had them for verisimilitude, and bathrooms often existed for jacuzzis. My spaceship was a practical exercise--so I had neither to save space, but I told people their absence was out of homage to the original _Star Trek_ where the _Enterprise_ never showed bathrooms. I did have beds, though: a quiet place to read, virtual sex, my habit of sleeping while logged in--beds were useful.

The one quirk of the lower deck rooms was that the desks and beds were mounted in cylindrical wall units. In space, the floor of the lower deck was the opposite side of the of the floor of the upper deck--this was because the viewports were below the wing--which would have put the windows near the floor if both decks had the same up direction. This was purely esthetic--to preserve an appearance from above more like the prototype, but it also gave the cabins a cool, otherworldly feel as well. However, while this worked in space, on a planet with gravity that would work opposite the ship's artificial gravity, the lower deck's floor and ceiling had to change roles. Cabinetry, tie-downs, and seatbelts on spaceships were important, anyway: artificial gravity could well fail in space--a point lost on many ships from the worlds of sci-fi. Also, unlike the Lego inspiration, both compartments were air tight, there was a hatch between the command and cargo sections, a second, small ramp allowing people to board located just forward of the cargo bay. There was also an airlock leading to the wings and a hatch for docking with other ships. 

The Lego ship had forward and side facing guns--these were functioning laser canons on my ship. There was also a more powerful, rotating laser canon mounted under the hull just in front of the personnel ramp. Also mounted under the hull were missile racks capable of holding six missiles, including two respawning mounts, and a pair of rotating .50 caliber cannons. There was also a torpedo/probe launching tube under the cargo bay. On the defensive side, on top of an armor class of 29, my ship had the most powerful shields commercially available, a cloaking device, a Misguided Missile system that was deigned to scramble missiles' electronic guidance systems, and a Medallion of Magic Invulnerability--this last had been somewhat oversold as fire and lightning spells could damage the ship, but it was still very effective against freezing and tether spells and any magic missile, usually a sure and very damaging hit, would just fly past. (The downside of that, however, was that it sabotaged my shrink spell--the _Legolas_ could not change size, and with the calibration required to make it work, it was not something easily removed and re-installed.) Getting back to tethering, the _Legolas_ had a grappling hook and two tractor beams--one mounted on the bottom of the hull (in the same unit as the rotating laser canon and grappling hook), and one inside the cargo bay to aid in loading. The security system was top of the line--if anyone not on my approved list came aboard, the unwelcome guests would be treated to a laser light show and a truly shocking experience from the walls and floors--the average survival time for those who had tried seemed to be around six seconds. No flagship would be complete without a high-grade AI with autopilot (in this case, with the voice of Orlando Bloom), high-end scanners and sensors, and three repair droids. 

Engines? Covered. My ship had an oscillation overthruster to allow it to pass through solid matter. I must admit, while the gravitational and inertial control systems were top of the line when I bought them, that was when the ship was new, so they were a little out of date by now, but the ship could still pull gut-splattering turns without the occupants even spilling their virtual coffee, in addition to having artificial gravity. Its backup propulsion system was an Orb of Magic Motion--if I blundered into a magic-only zone--I could enchant my way out. The primary propulsion was an Activision Mark IX Hyperdrive--it was capable of traveling at light speed, making my ship as fast as any ship in the OASIS (Warp Drive stories aside). The light speed drive was designed to run for up to 120 continuous hours (more than enough to go across the OASIS corner-to-corner twice), boasted 99.65% reliability, and it was the second most fuel efficient light speed drive on the market--the only more efficient drive this year's model produced by IOI, and there was no way in hell I was going to put an IOI drive in my pride and joy to save two percent on fuel costs, even if it could match the Activision unit in reliability (IOI claimed a better number--though many users maintained it might not even be 95% reliable)--no, I would wait seven more months to stick with a company whose pedigree went back to _Freeway_ , _River Raid_ , and _Pitfall!_ for my next upgrade. 

The equipment room was very crowded.

The _Legolas_ would have been fully loaded even without its crown jewel: secured on the bridge was an artifact I found nine years ago, Saved by Zero. Saved by Zero originally was designed to find simulated black holes--but as a side effect of of OASIS physics models, it could identify every null zone within 20 light minutes. There weren't many null zones in space--a zone where neither magic nor technology worked would be unnavigable. Some people created such zones to make sure no one approached (or left) their planets. Of course, those appeared on charts: GSS, Google, IOI, DEI, and at least a dozen other companies made navigational charts of the OASIS. The real danger was that zones changed. Someone wanting privacy might have bought a piece of surreal estate and changed its rules since the last map update. (In fairness--I was no innocent when it came to accurate mapping. When I knew Google and GSS mapping droids came around, I would temporarily convert PlanetArgon to a null zone. Helped keep tourists away--though it didn't always work.) Others might have created a null zone by accident while fiddling with the physics of their space. The worst were the pirates--it was not unheard of for assholes to turn an area of space into a null zone, wait for failing life support systems to kill the occupants of a ship, then turn on the tech again, go in, and collect the derelict spaceship--now working again. Sufficient to say that null zones made space travel dangerous unless you stuck to well-established navigational lanes, which often were longer and had their own dangers--most pirates stuck to those and you could be easily followed. Saved by Zero meant that the _Legolas_ was the only ship in the OASIS that could go off the beaten path and not risk sudden death--I always knew about null zones before crossing the border. The wooden-framed obsidian mirror didn't go with the blue computer consoles on the bridge, but for an artifact that saved my avatar's life multiple times, I could forgive the clashing decor.

And no--if you're wondering--a ship like this doesn't come cheap. When I insured it, they appraised it at 735,000 credits. Yes--I insured my virtual spaceship. My OASIS spaceship is worth more than my real-world house and car. (In fairness, I used my spaceship more than the car, and I got a nice spaceship and a cheap house and car by choice.) Fuel, repairs, and insurance cost more each month than many OASIS low-end shuttles would cost to buy.

And yes--I meant the double meaning. The _Legolas_ was named after Tolkien's elf--the AI's voice and poster in my cabin of Orlando Bloom proved that connection. (Plus, Orlando Bloom is hot. He was hot then. Even now, pushing 70 years old, he's still hot. I'd take him over most college guys half my age. Or let him take me as the case may be. I have a crush.) That said, the name was also a play on words though: Lego lass.

  
 

* * *

I woke up in my cabin on Tuesday morning. I'd slept well the night before. Seeing no messages and no threats to my ship, I logged out to tend to my morning hygiene. A few minutes later, I logged back in. Still a few hours out from my destination, I watched _Titus_ in the hope I might gain some insights into my target. Nearly three hours of murder, dismemberment, rape, and cannibalism in Shakespeare at his darkest didn't seem to provide insight.

Andronici was a weird partial PvP zone. The Shakespeare Cluster was a collection of forty-two small worlds in Sector 8, each dedicated to one of Shakespeare's plays (all thirty-six in the First Folio, plus _Pericles, Prince of Tyre_ , _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ , and the questionably canonical _Edward III_ , _Sir Thomas More_ , _Edmund Ironside_ , and _Double Falsehood_.). You could watch NPCs play out the plays. You could visit a museum dedicated to that play--both its underlying history and its performance history. Or, you could play out the plays--simulations designed so that you could play out the plays as written, but with the fatal blow not killing your avatar, or for you to play to an optimal ending where Romeo and Juliet live happily ever after or Hamlet kills Claudius then beats the crap out of the army of Fortinbras. So far, no reason for PvP--and the parts of the planet that were set up for that were safe zones--visited by cultural elitists and school field trip groups alike. However, the designers also took things a step further--players could play against each other, where, for instance, one might try to play Hamlet and another Claudius, with both of them trying to retain the Danish crown and kill the other. Or just fight in the settings of the plays. These areas were PvP. Most of the planets were no-magic zones--though some such as MidsummerAthens and Glamis were exceptions to that. You would think that they'd also be no-tech zones--but you'd be wrong. The designers of the Shakespeare Cluster wanted visitors to be able to arrive in spaceships. The unintended consequence was that people did things with that tech--while I was in college, I saw a production of _Hamlet_ done with _Star Wars_ costumes: Claudius in a Darth Vader mask, Ophelia with Princess Leia's hair, and all the swordfights done with lightsabers. It was something to see.

I had the _Legolas_ land only long enough to drop me off--I saw no reason to have it take up a landing pad, and it was harder to steal the ship if it was circling thousand feet overhead. Partly looking for insight, and partly just appreciating the virtual environment, I strolled over to the arena. _Titus Andronicus_ was vague about the timeframe of its setting--so the planet was a pastiche of all of ancient Rome. Most proper ancient Roman sims were focused on specific periods--and people would get pissed if you didn't know when Egypt or Gaul or wherever was conquered or when this or that classic was written. Some of those sims were populated exclusively by players who spoke Latin and who'd refuse to speak the contemporary languages they surely had to speak as well. There were Roman sims where Latin might well be the only common language of the players--I remember reading a news story about a Roman Republic planet where about half the population was Italian and much of the rest British. Shakespeare was vague about his history in this play--so the sim was equally vague.

It also bears observation that the planets in the Shakespeare Cluster saw visitors in proportion to the late '40s popularity of the plays. _Titus Andtonicus_ was not a favorite of scholars or teachers, so Andronici tended to be pretty quiet.

I spent the first twenty or thirty minutes just taking in the sights. Andronici was creepy--there was a tension in the the forum. Vague in period as it was, this was Rome under threat from the Goths. The shoppers were tense. It reminded me of the first few months after Tampa was nuked. The creators of the Shakespeare Cluster wanted to make the Bard relevant. War, violence, fear--the sim's creators saw a reflection of our times in the Elizabethian era depiction of ancient Rome. Be it the Goths invading Rome, or the Spanish Armada threatening England, or unknown foreigners hiding an H-bomb in a shipping container, there were scary, dangerous, angry forces across the border. And there were obscure, desperate criminals at home who know the invasion and fall were at hand--whether it was or not--and a knife in your back for the coins (or credit cards) in your purse was all too likely, too. At least the threats in the OASIS wouldn't kill you.

However, they were looking at me funny. I wore a cyberpunk suit of armor from Art3Miss. It looked good, the label had cachet, and it was solid and flexible +7 body armor. But in ancient Rome I looked like a freak--I stood out like a Labrador Retriever at a cat show. NPCs were turning heads--suspecting I was up to something. Since I was--this wasn't great. I found a stall in the forum, and bought a tunic and toga. I left the body-armor on--I expected to be in a fight soon. Fortunately, the OASIS didn't simulate temperatures--overdressing would slightly hinder my motion, but I was also planning to rip the clothes off if I needed to. Just put the garments on over my usual clothes, and move on. I also changed my hair from purple to black. I walked on to the arena eliciting fewer stares. 

When I arrived in the arena, I took a seat near the NPC emperor. The arena was sparsely populated--there were about two dozen people in the stands, about two-thirds in ancient Roman dress, about half of those not being in Elizabethan English skins. In progress, a retiarius equipped with a trident and net was fighting a secutor armed with the traditional tall shield and short sword. The two of them seemed to be more dancing than fighting. Welcome to the bush league of Deathmatch. 

I looked around the stands. I didn't immediately spot anyone who looked like the picture I was given. Maybe the guy in the trench coat and fedora? Crap--did my target adopt a new skin? I even looked at the emperor. He looked like Patrick Stewart playing Captain Picard at a toga party. (It may have been--people will use old footage of actors for NPCs all the time, and Stewart was a Shakespearean actor.) The toga and tunic I put on were now seriously in my way--I spent the next two minutes fiddling with my clothes to get to my binoculars.

The binoculars had face recognition software in them. I scanned the arena--and promptly felt like an idiot. There--in the middle of the arena: his face was obscured by his helmet, but his name was displayed over his head. The secutor was Mephistopheles. I put away my binoculars, and grabbed ErIk_TaNnEr's button box. I looked at the box, and pushed the yellow button. I clipped the box to the sleeve of my armor. I then took out a lightsaber--holding it in my hand as I watched the fight. 

I'd ignored the arena combat at first, but I now had reason to watch and was much more focused on it than before. Mephistopheles, supposedly the great level-99 fighter, was barely holding his own against a level 56 opponent. FishyKing, the retiarius, was very aggressive, but measured. Mephistopheles was stronger and more agile--able to physically pull away from the net as FishyKing tried to entangle his sword. However, FishyKing was picking and choosing his attacks; stabbing with the trident when Mephistopheles had some particular lapse--a lowered shield or a half-turn away. Mephistopheles was swinging his sword less carefully, and you could feel frustration and impatience in his attacks. The pattern repeated: Mephistopheles would go in for a rash attack, FishyKing would entangle the sword, and Mephistopheles would pull away with brute force.

The decisive blow for Mephistopheles was dumb luck. FishyKing lost his footing as Mephistopheles tried to pull away and landed flat on his back. Mephistopheles pounced--literally. As FishyKing took a knee to the chest an audible "Oommf" filled the arena. I thought Mephistopheles was going to just kill FishyKing. He stopped. The emperor gave thumbs up. Mephistopheles waved his arms in obvious frustration. FishyKing continued to lie on his back. Mephistopheles paced with palpable frustration, turned to the emperor, and got another thumbs up. By now, FishyKing was finding his feet. 

I leapt into the arena and activated my lightsaber. I could feel the whole arena staring at me. I didn't care. FishyKing was running off with an obvious limp. Mephistopheles charged in my direction, swinging the gladius wildly. We didn't fight long. My first swing of the lightsaber cut his shield and sword into two. With my backswing, I cut off his right hand and his right leg. 

I don't know why, but I happened to glance at the emperor. He was giving the thumbs up--the no kill signal from what I saw earlier. I didn't care. I continued to hold the lightsaber to Mephistopheles' neck. "This is for Melmac and the Tanner Family Gunter Clan."

"What?"

"Revenge--for the people you killed."

"So that's what this was all about. That's why he gave me..." He was starting to reach up and point when I beheaded him. The message flashed on my screen, "Killed: Mephistopheles; Player, Level 99 Warrior. 100,000,000 Experience Points."

I had my finger on the red button--but I didn't push it. This was all wrong. I didn't even break a sweat killing another Level 99 avatar? I looked at the stands. Most of the sparse crowd was jeering and cat-calling. The man with the fedora wasn't. He'd taken off his hat. The dead ringer for the man I was supposed to kill. He was just standing there with a frightened look on his face as I held my finger over the button. He had his avatar on for the world to see, also--and the name surprised me most of all: IOI-101121.

The sux0rz, of course, had numbers that began with six. Hence the name. It was well known from the real world that the numbers starting with four or seven were collections--I'd heard that some of them stalked around the OASIS repossessing or seizing spaceships, planets, weapons, and anything else of value from people who owed IOI money. I'd run into a few collection droids, but never an avatar. I had seen several numbers beginning with three--these were tech support people who probably ventured into the virtual world to solve some problem. I'd once seen a number starting with two--a friend told me that that was probably an IOI PR or advertising person. The same friend also said that numbers starting with 101 were top executives.

This was the first time I'd ever seen any IOI employee who didn't have the cookie-cutter default face and blue uniform. Whoever he was--the legion of doom cut him slack.

This was my turn for a rash attack. I hurled my lightsaber at him, then tore off the tunic and toga I was wearing. I pulled out a grenade and my blaster--tossing the former at him and firing two shots. It was all to no avail--he had a personal shield. 

About five seconds later, a standard IOI gunship flew over the arena. A dozen standard IOI avatars dropped from lines from the ship into the arena. The ship also tossed a pack to IOI-101121. He retrieved it. As I picked off three of the drones with the blaster, I could only watch as the executive donned a jetpack and flew away.

I saw this, quickly kicked the pile of coins Mephistopheles when he died (adding the cash to my inventory) and began running in the same direction as IOI-101121. The gunship fired at me directly as I ran. I managed to clamber up the wall and back into the stands. Before they could get a good bead on me, I made it into one of the exit tunnels. I turned and fired several blaster shots. I went back to my inventory--I put away the button box since I wasn't pushing the button. I decided to also put back the blaster. I grabbed a couple of grenades and lobbed them down the corridor. I then put on a personal shield and activated it. Next--I had my own jetpack--I put that on. Finally, I grabbed a pair of mini-Uzis and several grenades. I tossed one out the far end of the tunnel. However, rather than following it out, I ran back to the arena--as I expected, they hadn't expected me to double-back. Most of the sux0rz, for lack of a better word for them, had left the arena via jetpack or other tunnels. I mowed the last few down with my submachine guns and dropped the guns--letting the shoulder straps keeping them close. I then took a Stinger missile from my inventory. I fired the jetpack, and, once I cleared the arena, I fired the missile at the gunship. The guidance system meant my shot was spot on. The missile actually went through the cockpit windshield and blew up inside the cockpit. The ships seemed to hang in the air after the explosion for about three seconds, long enough for me to wonder if I needed to try something else before the satisfying second explosion were the gunship blew itself to bits.

I fired my jetpack again and looked around. IOI-101121, whether he was the real Mephistopheles or not, was gone. I also saw a swarm of avatars appearing from a transport terminal. I didn't feel like fighting all of IOI. It was time to head home. I might have used my Ring of Teleportation, but I used it three weeks before. So, I simply flew higher and called for my ship to open the cargo ramp and decloak when I was within fifty feet so I could board at altitude. A pair of sux0r gunships were on my six. The _Legolas_ was better armed, better shielded, and better piloted. They fired at least three missiles that did nothing. I climbed, did a loop, and, now on their six, destroyed both with a single baby nuke--my own weapon damaging my shields more than all of theirs.

As I entered space and lightspeed, I checked my credit balance. I didn't get the 35,000 credits due to me for killing Mephistopheles; technically, I hadn't completed the job because I didn't push the button, of course. Not that I was completely stiffed--I had the 15,000 credits from the up-front portion, plus about 2000 credits from Mephistopheles directly: some NPCs gave you cash when you killed or defeated them; while that didn't happen with players, you'd get any cash they had on them. So--I'd earned more since last Sunday than most people would earn this month.

I took out the button box. I stared at it for a moment. I had a theory--I was going to test it out when I got home.

In the words of Han Solo, "I have a bad feeling about this."


	3. Return to PlanetArgon

### Chapter 3: Return to PlanetArgon

I was fuming at my failure to kill IOI-101121, and at ErIk_TaNnEr's misinformation. I wanted to kill both of them. I gave serious thought to teleporting or using a stargate to get home quickly, or taking a side trip somewhere. I just wanted to _do something_. But nothing in particular--and the lack of something specific I wanted to do kept me from doing anything. I was restless. So, decided to slug it out on the _Legolas_. I tried watching _Blazing Saddles_ to pass the time. However--I was in a foul mood. I thought a comedy would cheer me up, but it didn't work and I shut off the movie halfway through. I ran a scan to make sure I wasn't being tailed. Nada. I was going back to the real world for a bit--so I e-mailed Alana to ask if her family needed anything from the store (the Ramirez family lived a few houses down, but they didn't own a car, making shopping difficult), cashed out a thousand credits, and logged out.

It was now mid-afternoon. I normally fed the stray cats at dinner time--but I was going to eat out, so I fed them now. I grew up with pet cats, and my brother's family still had a pair. I only had the strays--feeding them and taking them to the vet to be fixed and for shots was doing something for catkind. It felt wrong to keep a real pet cat when so much of my time was spent in the virtual world, but pets who also wanted to keep their distance worked well.

Most people who lived in trailers these days lived in "stacks"--unwieldy setups where jury-rigged metal frames converted trailers into cheap (and dangerous) tenement skyscrapers--a means of allowing more people to live near city centers and what jobs were there in these days when private cars were too expensive for most while government and business largely too dysfunctional and/or broke to provide adequate bus service. My trailer was not stacked--it was out in the woods. I lived just across the St. Mary's River from Folkston, Georgia. I had chosen my home very carefully. I'd grown up in Jacksonville, so I had ties to the area, and still had some real life friends there--though most of my life was in the OASIS, so my friends could just have easily been in Jackson Hole or Johannesburg or Jakarta. I did have a very elderly grandfather in a retirement community in The Villages--if anything happened to him, I could make the 140 mile drive in the real world in four hours. Florida had no state income tax--so I paid less to the government. Living in the woods, I also made a little money from my lease with the timber company. There was also the safety aspect--Folkston was away from the Interstate, the highway that brought the most trouble from both roving criminals and highwaymen, but it had some old federal highways going off in multiple directions, and if things went completely to hell and I couldn't use my car--there was a busy railroad in town, so I could hop a freight train. It was close enough to the city that if I needed a specialist doctor, or to catch a flight somewhere, or anything else only available in a large city, I could get there, but far enough away to be pretty safe from urban gangs, big city corruption, or the random nuclear attack. Best of all--utilities: because the rail line was important and the railroad's centralized traffic control needed electricity, the power was almost as reliable here as in New York or Columbus. Water came from my own well. Also, there was OkeeNet, the small, family-owned ISP started up in the late '20s. OkeeNet was granted a utility monopoly by the county as an exercise in cronyism--IOI had bought both the local phone company and the local cable TV franchise as part of larger deals, the county forced them to divest themselves of one, and the result of this was a small company with well-built infrastructure that was completely independent of IOI.

My trailer was nothing to look at. It had been built six decades ago, and had patches of rust and moss on the outside, despite treating it with chemicals to stop both. It was a larger single-wide, with three bedrooms--a master bath and master bedroom running the full width of the trailer, then a small hall to the kitchen--the hall leading you around the master bedroom's walk-in closet and a utility room off the kitchen, and with the "back door" off that hall. A kitchen and dining area spanned the width of the trailer, then the living room. A wood-burning stove had been added to the living room in one corner, against the wall backing up to the second bedroom. By the hallway leading to the other bedrooms, there was the "front door"--a door which I never used because it lead out to a deck that had half-collapsed before I bought the place. Further down the hall, there was a small bedroom, a second bathroom, and a third bedroom.

The décor was not anything that a reasonable person would call décor. Inside, the carpet and paneling on the walls would have been outdated in the '80s, even having been built then. Fortunately, no mold was inside, but it did have a musty smell from age--combated with scented candles. Largely absent was furniture. In the master bedroom, I had my queen-size bed, a nightstand, and a bookcase with a few physical books and photo albums I'd collected over the years. In the dining area, I used a card table and folding chair set as my dining table. In the middle of the living room was my OASIS suspension rig--the "cathedral" ceiling and size of the room made it the ideal place for it. There was also a computer desk that held all the computer gear needed to support good access the OASIS--PC, printer-scanner-copier-fax, monitor (in this case, an old, mid-size flat-panel TV), back-up hard disks, and router. The spare bedrooms were extra space--I used the smaller of the two as a storeroom for old computer and OASIS gear I no longer used--it held two disassembled suspension rigs, my old glove-and-visor console I had in high school, a quartet of PCs, a monitor, and a collection of other computer hardware--all of it was at best obsolete, and at worst, broken. (My actual kayak also was stored in that room--though I rarely used it, because rowing down a virtual river in the OASIS, it was never too hot or cold, never rained, and you didn't need to worry about mosquitoes or alligators--unless you wanted it that way.) The third bedroom was completely empty except for drying racks for clothes--the clothes dryer that came with the trailer was dead when I bought the place, so I decided to use the that space in the utility room for the cleaning unit for my haptic suits. When I first moved in, I considered renting out the second and third bedroom--the then smaller collection of obsolete hardware could have fit in the master bedroom, and I could have earned extra money--fresh out of college, I wasn't certain I cold make a living in the OASIS; however, I had an obnoxious roommate in college, making me hesitant to sacrifice my privacy, and I didn't want an argument about the OASIS rig in the middle of the living room. After a few months, it was clear that I could make my mortgage payments without a roommate--and so I lived alone.

I kept the house pretty clean inside, but on the outside it looked squalid. I did little to make it look nicer--I didn't care how it looked, and always thought that looking rundown would keep burglars away. Three bedrooms, jacuzzi tub in the master bath, almost 1200 square feet of space, and at one point, the place even had a swimming pool--albeit an above-ground model that collapsed decades ago--it boggled my mind that when the place was built sixty years ago, this was considered a _modest_ home. I had more house than most people could afford these days, but the previous owners sold it because they fell on hard times--they lived here during the real estate boom of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and were poor--even the nominally better-off then bought places two, three, even five times this size or larger.

  
  
  
* * *  
  


I placed my haptic suit in the cleaning unit, and then hung the suit that had been in the cleaning unit in the closet. I spent about an hour in the tub sulking.

After I got dressed in conventional clothes--bluejeans and a _Star Trek_ t-shirt (picture of Spock doing the Vulcan salute, with the words, "Live long and prosper"). I went next door, and asked Mrs. Scott if she needed anything from the store. Amanda Scott was a woman in her early 60s. Her husband died in a car wreck in the early '30s, and she was injured severely. The result was that she had enough settlement money that she didn't have to work, a bad addiction to pain pills, and a fear of going anywhere in a car, despite owning a self-driving model herself. I was always a little nervous asking--she could be in a foul mood if she was going through withdrawal, and she wouldn't take it well if she wanted pain pills because I'd say no, and we'd get into an argument. Luckily, she only wanted toilet paper, frozen TV dinners, and potato chips--no acrimony about my not being a drug dealer.

The drive to Georgia took twenty minutes. While the car drove there, I reviewed a log I made of my initial conversation with ErIk_TaNnEr. I saw nothing remarkable in the logs.

Folkston is a small town. It was beginning to become suburbanized before the Great Recession, but runaway gas prices coupled with a dearth of mass transit left it a small town. A few tourist attractions, a few determined commuters, and plenty of railroad workers meant that it had all the conveniences, though.

My first stop was at the ATM. I didn't like using my debit card around town--an identity thief could possibly use that as a gateway to my OASIS account. This was the way to turn my OASIS credits into cash.

My next stop was my private mailbox. I wasn't expecting anything, but I always checked. All my bills came to my e-mail except tax bills--those had to be mailed. I'd have packages sent here--the package drones had been known to go to the wrong trailer, and I didn't want to chance losing packages. There was also the more than occasional piece of junk mail--which was all I had today. I had a recall notice for my car--everything else went from the box to the trash.

Next stop was my hair stylist. Some heavy-duty OASIS fiends went completely hairless. I didn't--I thought it best to keep some hair and get a little less attention in the real world. However, my hair was beginning to get a little long for my taste--I did like to keep it in a short cut that was variously described as "butch" or "pixie." So--touch-up time. My stylist was in a chatty mood--and I was not. A movie that supposedly told Parzival's life story was about to come out. She was super excited about it. I couldn't have cared less--I'd read things that the man himself had written, and was not interested in a sensationalist and erroneous history of recent events. So, I mostly let her talk and didn't listen.

Next was dinner. Luca's is a decent New York-style pizzeria--it had been my go-to pizzeria since I'd lived in the area. Dining alone was mostly a quiet affair. As I sat down, waiting for the pizza to cook, I began to watch TV--the set was tuned to a news channel. The big story was that DEI filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. Digital Enterprises International--commonly known as DEI--was IOI writ small: they bought up every telecom concern they could gobble up, bought surreal estate and other assets in the OASIS which they then rented to clients, they set up servers for cloud storage--really anything related to the telecom and IT industries. And, like IOI, they even had their own corporate egg hunters. No one took them seriously--they were less competent than the sux0rz and they didn't have good funding. DEI's gunter division wasn't even as large as the bigger gunter clans. No one wanted them to win any more than they wanted IOI to pull it off--the difference was that no one outside of DEI actually really thought/feared they could. A friend once called them, "Too trivial even for target practice"--that summed it up well. They'd pinned the company's hopes on pulling that rabbit out of that hat. When they didn't, many of their best people left--retired or went to IOI--and many of their investors and bondholders backed out. The problem was that they were playing catch-up with IOI. Same wolf pack, and they were clearly beta wolf at best. The only reason IOI didn't bother to squash them through the regulators in their pocket or through a leveraged buyout was that their existence helped keep the anti-trust zealots at bay. The other shoe had finally dropped last week, surprising no one, when Disney cancelled a distribution deal they had with DEI--taking with them the most valuable content DEI handled on the distribution side. Everyone knew the patient was sick, so the death surprised no one. RIP DEI.

When the news went on to discuss the next story, it was about that time that my pizza was ready. I went up to the counter to get it. The hipster teenager behind the counter tilted her head in the direction of the TV set. "You follow the telecom business?"

"Yes. I used to be a gunter. I still earn my living in the OASIS."

" ** _COOL!_** I used to be a gunter, too--but the only great thing that came of it was my avatar dying at Castle Anorak--which was cool, 'cause, it was like the biggest thing to ever happen online."

I nodded. "I was there too." I smiled softly."

"High five!" She raised her hand--and we slapped. She then asked something that I can't recall having been asked before: "I was wondering...why does IOI still maintain such a large OASIS presence?" I had to admit that I didn't know. This gave me something to chew on besides the pizza pie. One of the things that DEI took a hit on was that they bought a ton of virtual gear for the Hunt, as much as they could afford. They then sold it on the cheap when the contest was over, because it was no use anymore. IOI hadn't sold their gear. Was sux0rz's custom crap that much out of demand? I had a pair of their gunships lingering in my hanger--during the Hunt, people would steal them from time to time, I'd fence them, and other people would buy them as fake trophies or target practice or for schemes to attack sux0rz. After the Hunt was over--the two that I had on inventory remained on inventory. No one looked twice at them. However, IOI still had a planet full of gear. Why keep it? They seemed to use some of it to repossess virtual property--but they did that during the contest so they had to have surplus. The Hunt was over--it was no use now. Was it? Was it some sort of tax gimmickry, or did they realize it had no value, so they just kept it in case they thought of some future use?

My final stop in town was the grocery store. For myself, staples for cooking for when I felt more ambitious, several frozen dinners for when I didn't, snacks, some toilet paper, soap, tampons, and a bag of cat food. I then got all of Mrs. Scott's shopping list. I checked my e-mail while at the store--all Mrs. Ramirez wanted was milk. The guy in line behind me was not happy that I rang up three separate cash transactions.

In the car on the way home, I reviewed the battle on Andronici. I was not happy with my performance there--I was rash in my attempt to kill IOI-101121, and I nearly got my ass handed to me as a result. The interesting thing was something I completely missed in the stadium. A small detail that didn't even register in my sight at the time. And, as far as I could tell--IOI-101121 missed this figure too. While I was charging IOI-101121, there was a figure in the stands across from him who was shooting some sort of laser blaster at him. The figure had a costume something like a medieval plague doctor, or maybe Long-Snoot from the original _Star Wars_ , or possibly a goth version of the Muppet Gonzo. I didn't have a good screen shot of this figure--I never looked at him for any length of time--he was barely in my periphery here and there. No name over this guy--I have no idea who he is (and I might be going out on a limb assuming it is a guy). As best I could tell he didn't run when the shit started hitting the fan in the arena--he kept shooting until IOI-101121 literally flew off, and I lost sight of him by running into the tunnel. He was still there when I doubled-back, but leaving--it _looked_ a _lot_ like he was just calmly walking out of the arena. I had another mystery. I found the best image in my log that I could pick out, and saved it as a picture file.

I dropped off my neighbors' groceries, plugged in my car, put away my groceries, changed back into my haptic suit, and logged back onto the OASIS. I took a moment to scan the recall notice into the car so that it would go to the dealership and get repaired. I then logged in, and did my daily workout aboard the _Legolas_ \--the ship was still several hours away from home. It was time for a night for an early bedtime. 

  
  
  
* * *  
  


My virtual home is a veritable supervillain's lair, because the supervillain always has the coolest base. In the OASIS, I lived on a private world with a warren of tunnels holding more than two hundred rooms.

PlanetArgon had been my home and business in the OASIS for more fifteen years. Officially designated S16A299--and the final digits of the number were one of its selling points--I'd bought it in 2032, three years after college, and long before Halliday's contest started, and never felt the need to upgrade it. My given name for it was a take-off on Superman's Planet Kyrpton. As "Kyrpton" meant "the mysterious one," "Argon" meant "the lazy one" and this was my retreat in the OASIS--business location or not. The name also seemed just the right combination of cool sounding, but not so cool that it might attract unwanted visitors, and true. There was also an inside joke--years ago, my sister and I were watching a show about archeology, when the voiceover made a reference to a tank of "dangerous argon gas." Anyone who has taken chemistry knows that argon is about as far from dangerous as gasses get--there is a suffocation hazard if you try breathe an atmosphere of pure argon, but that's about it. We found the comment funny, and I'm sure that was also in the back of my mind when I named the world. In any case, calling it a "planet" may have overstated things--it was a potato-shaped, cratered, asteroid, about three miles wide at the "equator" and five miles long "pole" to "pole"--the geographic terms being very arbitrarily defined by me since PlanetArgon neither rotated nor had a magnetic field. It's in cluster of a few hundred private asteroids located two light-minutes from Neonoir, the closest public planet.

There are about a dozen exits onto the surface, including five large enough to fly a wide range of spaceships through--however, most of these exits are designed to look like craters. There are, nevertheless, a few permanent signs on the surface that it is something other than a dead rock. Near the equator there is a bunker and my large-bomb test range. Besides the bunker and nearby scorch marks, on the opposite side of the asteroid, near the north pole, stands a collection of life-size structures and a small landing strip mimicking the Classic Lego Space sets of the late '70s and early '80s. I'd found some of my father's sets as a child and they struck my imagination; between the '80s craze of the contest and buying the _Legolas_ , I revisited that piece of nostalgia, and built the "moonbase" as a playground for both my imagination and my sister's children.

Geologically speaking, my asteroid had a crust of simulated light gray regolith, a mantle of exotic materials designed to protect against magical attacks, and a core made of dense, solid, stable trans-actinide alloy well suited to defend against technological attacks, as well as explosions or radiation from any source.

The south pole is where I keep my arms-dealing business. There is a large hanger with two space-doors, and a number of bays where my inventory spaceships can be parked and secured. There is also a docking arm--allowing people to come in from spaceships couldn't come into the hanger, either from being too large--like the Imperial Star Destroyer that came by three weeks ago to pick up one case of .44 pistol rounds (I didn't ask)--or too untrustworthy--like ErIk_TaNnEr's off-the-shelf _Delta Flyer_. Coming off the ends the hanger, there were two cross-connected corridors shaped like an A. Off the corridor near the western surface, I have my offices and meeting rooms. Besides the Chief's office from _Get Smart_ , I also have Captain Picard's ready room, Sam Spade's office from the 1941 _Maltese Falcon_ (with a black-and-white rendering atmosphere that makes the office and everyone in it black-and-white), the Headmaster's office from Hogwarts, the Oval Office from the White House, a copy of Halliday's office from GSS headquarters, the Emperor's throne room on the second _Death Star_ , a meeting room from the _Star Trek_ original series, the meeting room from the first _Death Star_ , and a few other franchise offices and conference rooms. I also have a windowless "dull room" office that has plain gray walls and a desk taken from a standard military design, three plain wooden chairs chosen to be uncomfortable, and poster of a kitten hanging from a clothes line with the phrase "Hang in there." Except for the dull room all of the offices were standard, off-the-shelf rooms--I am no decorator. But I have made a key modification as needed--all of them have a secret passage that I can use to get out quickly. My favorite office is the Chief's--that was the first one I had--I moved it from my old apartment on Neonoir--and the one I use the most. But I wanted a selection so could please/intimidate/aggravate my guests as appropriate. Also off that corridor is a small rec-room filled with '80s video games, a half dozen guest rooms of various themes for business guests, the brig also from he original _Star Trek_ , and a holodeck from TNG (to simulate environments I hadn't thought of in advance--though this was inside-the-box thinking because, just by reprogramming by asteroid itself, I could create new environments; in essence, the whole OASIS was one big holodeck), access to the docking arm, an airlock to the surface, and a couple of labs. Off the other corridor buried deep in the asteroid, were moost of labs, workshops, automated factories, firing ranges, raw material storage rooms, and arsenal showrooms for various weapons--magic objects, sci-fi weapons, guns, swords, bombs, robots. I think the magic lab also came out of Hogwarts, but most of them were generic designs, not from any media franchise.

The truth be known, I had more labs than I routinely used. When I designed the asteroid, I planned lots of labs and workshops. I planned to make weapons of my own design. However, too much adventuring and too many used weapons for sale meant I almost never used the labs and workshops. I actually deleted some random weapons lab when the contest began, I put in recreations of every room shown in _Anorak’s Invitation_.

Below my work areas, there were three secondary hangers--each with a single door of their own. These were used for guests' ships, and a place to stash excess inventory that I didn't keep in my main hanger--if you're setting up a showroom floor, there are only so many examples of the same ship you can display before it becomes redundant and boring. Above the work areas were two side chambers off the main hanger--one for repairs, and two others for storing ships more ships--especially my personal ships that weren't for sale.  
Towards the north pole was the fun end of the asteroid. The private living area was built off of a circular corridor. There were about forty more guest rooms and several living/family/sitting rooms--all lifted from various media franchises. There were also other recreational rooms: a movie theater, bowling alley, mini golf course, gymnasium, rowing simulator, garden, swimming pool--if I had the money to buy it, the room to put it in, and a desire for it at some point, then I probably had it. With the credits from mercenary work and arms dealing, and my own private world--the hardest hurdle really was whether I had a whim to add something--and that hurdle could be bypassed if a guest wanted something and could talk me into it--hence the racquetball court. Occasionally, I would tear something out to make room for something else--my niece's fixation with horses caused the ice rink to go in favor of a stable and riding trails (trails we rarely used because she because of space compression effects she didn't like). Most of the recreational facilities were off-the-shelf rooms--as with my offices, I mostly acknowledged that I don't decorate well. I did jam my garden and swimming pool together--knowing I'd be burying it deep in an asteroid, I bought an indoor pool--but it seemed a waste to not use the simulated window when I had a simulated outdoor space. So--part of the brick wall came down and a glass "pool building" replaced it. A couple of the guest rooms were positioned over the pool building, also, and had windows looking out onto this park, and the pool building also had a back entrance to my personal apartment. Having this setup, I then decided to link my rowing sim into this personal park--so the duck pond got a small boathouse, and a creek that led off to the rowing sim--meaning that creek flowed into a virtual version of the St. Mary's River near my real world house, or a virtual River Thames in Oxford, or virtual Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, or a virtual Baranduin River in Bucklebury Ferry, or any other virtual river I wanted to take my kayak down--pressing a button in the boathouse changed where the outlet from the pond led.

In the center of the rec area was my personal arcade. Of the more than two hundred rooms on my asteroid, my arcade was the most ambitious that I designed and decorated myself, the only one in the rec area that wasn't off the shelf. The room was shaped like two circles each with a curved hallway off it--if you looked at the floorplan, it looked like "99." I'd been a fan of the old TV show _Get Smart_ , and it showed--two of the most frequently used rooms on my asteroid were based on the show's most iconic sets, and my own handle in the OASIS was Agent99--I named myself after Barbara Feldon's character. Of course, the old video games I loved would have been in the future for that show.

The walls of the arcade had movie posters for my favorite films and TV shows between the games--many of these movies were not from Halliday's favorite list, which pissed off gunter friends who wanted to know what I was thinking about the Hunt, but this was my playspace, not a guide to the Egg Hunt. Life did not begin and end in the '80s, as my handle ought to remind people. I decorated the room years before the Hunt, changed little for the Hunt, and changed nothing when it ended. Occasionally, I would take down a poster I grew tired of, or, more often, add one for a delightful new discovery. However, the posters were for my own satisfaction. Same with the games--I changed them around a lot in the early days, and made changes through the years. Most of those changes were for the Hunt, when I added some game I thought I needed to practice ( _Black Tiger_ \--spot on; _Crack Down_ \--not so much), but it was getting rare that I would discover a new video game that I wanted to add to the arcade--since the Hunt, I'd been returning to games that were personal favorites that I neglected because Halliday didn't seem to care for them.

The walls and carpet were two-tone blue in shades I found both pleasant and calming. The round parts of the room had space in the middle for non-video games--an air hockey table, a ping-pong table, a Chexx hockey game--things like that. The halls were wide enough to have console games along both sides of each hall. I had hundreds. Most simulated console games cost less than ten credits each, many less than five credits, and I had money and a taste for retro culture before the contest. This was where I learned _Joust_ well enough to beat the lich. This was where I learned to play _Tempest_ like a billionaire. I had both before the contest. Here was where I mastered a hundred other games that meant nothing in the Hunt. Here was where I goofed off.

I even included my own Easter egg into the arcade room. I kept waiting for a guest to find it.

Over the arcade was my private apartment. The apartment was centered around Maxwell Smart's living room. A blue quarter-circle couch was built into a room divider wall, facing a fireplace. Behind the couch, a couple of steps up, there was a bar, a couple of windows, and a flight of stairs leading up and out of the room. I took some liberties with the room, though: the fourth wall--normally unseen in the actual show because that's where the cameras were--was where I put a big-screen TV and a rack for video game consoles. Also, displayed over the fireplace, was Soundwave--the robot I chose at the Jade Gate. And, while one window looked out onto a simulated Washington, D.C.--reflecting the location of the apartment in the TV show, the other window, by the bar, looked out on my simulated duck pond.  
The door behind the bar, leading to a kitchen in the show, led to a small armory and escape route.

The bedroom of the apartment, however, did not match any bedroom depicted in _Get Smart_. Right now, it looked like Captain Kirk's quarters--but I changed the room a lot. Too many iconic bedroom sets were either too frilly, or too Spartan. This one came down on the Spartan side, but the bed was comfortable and it had a view screen.

All told, the corridors of both areas of the asteroid looked like the Swedish letter Å, but with a bigger circle and parallel lines for my emergency corridors. Also--my corridors used space compression--from the hallways, the spacing of the doors would make you think the rooms were small--but the rooms were really large, and some were a flight of stairs up or down from the main halls.

If you think this a lot of space for one person--it is for most people. However, I had reasons for wanting my own asteroid. I wanted to control access to my home and business--a private planet is the best for that. I needed a bombing range and large hanger--there was no way a building somewhere would have been enough. Beyond that--the OASIS was the true post-scarcity economy--anything a computer could create and hold as and in a simulation could be made for free. You did not need to be extraordinarily wealthy to own an asteroid.

It wasn't lonely, though. I had a about thirty friends and family members who I trusted enough to grant them permanent access, and a few who had carte blanche to bring guests. Despite the term "permanent," I could always revoke it--there were a couple of times I did. There were also some labs, offices, and my private apartment where I had exclusive access. Many were friends who I knew in real life, and if someone made my list, I trusted that they were not only unlikely to cause trouble for me, but that I'd probably be inclined to back them up if they did.

Anyone who had permanent access also had their own guest room. Many of these rooms were clones of each other--I think a lot of them were set to a skin based on _Star Trek: The Next Generation_ officers' quarters (that seemed to be popular, based on my friends' rooms I'd looked inside.

Most of these friends and family came to visit me, or came to use the recreational facilities. I had a massive free entertainment complex, but it had the catch that it was not conveniently located if paying for travel were an issue. For all the things PlanetArgon had, it did not have a transport terminal. It was not a public planet, and this was a means of controlling access. I did own what looked like a warehouse on Neonoir, located near one of its transport terminals. Stored in the "warehouse" were a couple of less valuable ships to serve as launches for anyone who'd need to teleport in--including myself if I was in a hurry. While most of my permanent guests had their own homes somewhere (though I knew a couple brought dates to PlanetArgon, pretending it was their home), about a dozen friends made their full-time virtual homes there. I didn't object--the real world had fallen on hard times, and was raised with the idea that you took care of your own.

Of these, the worst case was Megatr0n. I didn't know Megatr0n very well in the real world. I'd met him when the Hunt began--he was a friend of a cousin, and I met Bob, as Megatr0n was known in the flesh, when I dropped in on my cousin on the way up north to visit my brother. He and my cousin were friends in college, but I had more in common with him than my cousin, and we hit it off. Megatr0n was another serious solo gunter, and majored in popular culture in college. During the Hunt, he was a good sounding board for ideas related to the quest. Since then, I knew he was having trouble finding work in the real world and had student loans that a charitable person would call obscene. In any case, he moved in about three months after Parzival won, having lost the lease on own his surreal estate lair. Megatr0n hadn't logged in for five months, his last OASIS location seemed to be his room on my world. I was pretty sure he'd wound up as indent for someone--most likely IOI. This made me sad--Megatr0n was cool and I hated the thought that his life had gone to crap. About a week after he last logged in, a few IOI probe droids showed up at PlanetArgon. I especially enjoyed blowing them to bits. Then, I got an e-mail from IOI demanding I turn over his ship. I didn't particularly follow consumer affairs stuff--but between what I had heard on the news and what appeared on gunter and mercenary message boards, I knew IOI couldn't actually do anything to me in the real world. In fact--that they sent an e-mail in the OASIS suggested they didn't know who I even was in the real world. I also knew that enough people didn't know that that it was certainly worth it to send an e-mail--it cost nothing and and would rattle a few people into handing over virtual stuff they could sell, meaning that tactic was pure profit. So--no ship for IOI. I did, however, sign up the IOI collections account to several spam lists. I also rigged Megatr0n's ship with a bomb--just in case someone did try to take it. A small bomb--it would only blow the cockpit off and kill anyone in the ship itself, and cued to allow Megatr0n or me to fly the ship without setting it off. I also put a lock on the door of Megatr0n's room--he'd know the answers to the questions needed to open the door, but if IOI somehow took over his avatar, they'd be stuck in the virtual recreation of Captain Picard's bedroom--all computer access disconnected, teleportation of people or objects in or out of the room blocked. Hope they like playing the flute.

In additional to my human friends, I had a horde of NPCs. I had the Cute Cats Pack, thirty realistic-looking cats that were programmed to do cute things. I also had a chuditch, given to me by a friend who visited the Perth Zoo (I was never sure if she'd visited the actual zoo or its OASIS counterpart), and the 18-inch-tall giraffe an ex-boyfriend gave me many years ago as a whimsical gift. These creatures roamed the halls of my asteroid to no practical purpose besides being cute and funny. For the same reason, I also had a mixed flock of ducks, domestic geese, Canada geese, and swans for the pond in the garden. I also had an alligator in the swimming pool: I planned to put him in the garden pond, but despite a computer science degree and being easily able to get him to leave swimmers alone, I was never able to get him to not massacre the atmosphere fowl in the pond. The birds and the gator generally remained in their particular home rooms--they couldn't open the doors on their own unlike the other pets. More practically, I also had some sentient NPC servants. Most of these were the Minions--the yellow bloblike things from the _Despicable Me_ franchise that spoke in gibberish and acted like lunatics. I had five characters purchased specifically as NPC servants: Igor from _Young Frankenstein_ , K-2SO from _Rogue One_ , Hymie the Robot from _Get Smart_ , Mongo from _Blazing Saddles_ , and the Gorn from the _Star Trek_ original series episode "Arena." These servants, unlike the Minions, could conduct conversations if need be. There were the Echo-Papa 608s also--you could see these droids patrolling the halls of my compound.

The asteroid felt busy enough.

I suppose it's no wonder I spent more time in this home than the one in the real world.

  
  
  
* * *  
  


It was early Wednesday morning when when the _Legolas_ landed back on PlanetArgon. I didn't normally get up this early, but I had a theory to test.

I took the button box straight to my main lab--driving a rover through my corridors to get there that much quicker. I redid one of the best scans that I could do quickly. It worked no better this time than Sunday. This time, though, there was another trick up my sleeve. 

I rigged up a robotic hand to hold the button box firmly, fingers over both buttons, but stiff--they wouldn't push the button until I gave the command. I then had an Echo-Papa 608 take the button box and hand in its tractor beam, and head out to the test range.

The closest thing to trouble with neighbors I'd ever had was with my "next door neighbor," SparkleShine. She complained that her guests on "LittleEquestria55," the next asteroid over from my lair, would get radiation hit points when I set off antimatter bombs and other large weapons. I don't know why she chose this neighborhood for her My Little Pony-themed home, but I had no issue with her, so I'd send her warnings of upcoming tests, healing potions, shields, and random gifts to try and keep the peace. It had worked. It was time to do it again. I called her, and warned her that I was about to test something of uncertain yield--there may be nothing, or there may be a huge boom. A robot with healing potions was on its way. In a similar vein, I sent e-mails to everyone living on my asteroid. I also broadcast a warning to passing ships.

It did not take long for the robot to get into position on my bomb range on the surface of PlanetArgon that faced away from Neonoir. I had two cameras fixed on the box, along with a range of sensors. I put on a virtual haptic glove--which was very meta--because one normally didn't wear haptic gear in the virtual world. I could feel the button box in my hand once again. I pushed the yellow button. Nothing happened. Then the red button. Nothing happened. This surprised me. So I tried again, almost casually--yellow button then the red. The second time did it.

My screens flashed with a bright light. I then felt the tremor and heard the boom from the explosion--the sound transmitted through the rock of the asteroid. I even took a few radiation hit points. I could only guess that pressing the yellow button the first time reactivated a safety, and that the second attempt turned the safety off again, to allow the red button to detonate the device. This was disconcerting--it meant from yesterday about noon until a moment ago, I was walking around with, effectively, a grenade without a pin. I shook my head in dismay. I rewound the recording of the detonation. The data spoke volumes--a split second after the red button was pushed--the device increased in mass, and one of the sensors picked up both magic and antimatter. Obviously either something like a bag of holding or some form of shrink spell was used to make an antimatter bomb small and light. The thing had a yield of between 200 and 250 megatons. A full size device that powerful should way at least 25 or 30 pounds--you could fake it with modified physics rules, but whoever built the box used magic to get around the problem instead. If ErIk_TaNnEr had handed me something that heavy, I would have been suspicious. Still--this was close enough to being fooled that I was now even more pissed. If I set it off on Andronici, I'd have killed everyone in the arena, including myself. Possibly everyone on the planet.


End file.
